Miliband, Edin full Edward Samuel Miliband ( born Dec. 24, 1969 , London, Eng.British politician who served as leader of the Labour Party (2010– ).

Miliband was the son of Jewish (and Marxist) refugees who had survived the Holocaust during World War II. Ralph Miliband, who had fled Belgium in 1940, became a prominent Marxist intellectual in London, where he met and married Marion Kozak, who had been sheltered by a Roman Catholic family in Poland throughout the war. Their sons, David and Ed, thus grew up in a household in which intense political debate was seldom absent for long. Ed followed his brother to Haverstock Comprehensive School and then to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, to study politics, philosophy, and economics before forging his own path with a master’s degree from the London School of Economics. In 1993, after a brief period as a television researcher, he started working for Labour Party MP Harriet Harman.

When Labour returned to power after the 1997 general election, Ed became a special adviser to Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown. With David working for Prime Minister Tony Blair, the brothers found themselves in different camps that frequently devolved into intraparty conflict. More than once, the siblings provided the channel through which disputes between Brown and Blair could be settled or, at least, calmed.

After having spent a year (2002–03) as a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Ed was selected as Labour candidate for Doncaster North, in Yorkshire. He was elected to Parliament in May 2005, four years after David had become an MP. When Brown took over as prime minister in 2007, he named David foreign secretary and added Ed to his cabinet, first as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster and then, from October 2008, as the inaugural secretary of state for energy and climate change. Thus, two brothers sat in Britain’s cabinet for the first time since the 1930s. Ed represented the United Kingdom at the 2009 Copenhagen summit on climate change. Although the summit failed to achieve a legally binding agreement to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, Ed was widely credited as having worked hard for a deal.

Following Labour’s defeat in the 2010 general election, Brown resigned as party leader, and David was regarded as the favourite to succeed him. Ed’s decision to stand against his brother (along with three other candidates) caused widespread surprise, but the contest quickly became a two-horse race. Strong campaigns by leading trade unions gave Ed a narrow victory (trade union members held one-third of the votes) on Sept. 25, 2010. Ed, who was 40 years old, became the party’s youngest leader since World War II. Subsequently , David decided to leave front-line politics and not serve in Ed’s shadow cabinet.

In 2011 Ed led Labour into elections for the National Assembly in Wales, the Scottish Parliament, and local councils throughout Britain with mixed results. While Labour gained 800 seats in local government in England, mostly at the expense of the Liberal Democrats, and fared well in Wales, its representation in Scotland shrunk so much that the Scottish Nationalist Party obtained an outright majority.